THE WARMIST BUREAU SAID THESE RAINS WOULDN’T COME FOR MONTHS. Well we did end up getting significant rain in April. Two whole months after the the first significant rains. Missed it by that much.
Rain? Floods? The Bureau of Meteorology, a warmist organisation, may need to check its models.
There will be no relief for drought-ravaged regions over the summer, with Bureau of Meteorology officials telling a meeting of state and federal ministers there would be no significant rain until at least April.
Global warming!, shrieked the media.
But then the real driver of the dry, the Indian Ocean Dipole, weakened, and the Bureau had another stab at this predicting game. From January 2:
January rainfall is likely to range from average to drier than average in eastern Australia… In February this pattern is likely to weaken, and although there remains a slight dry signal in parts of the east, much of the country shows no strong tendency towards either wetter or drier than average conditions for February to April… The positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) has weakened…
It really was stuck on that February-could-be-dry line.
February to April has roughly equal chances of being wetter or drier than average for most of Australia… Some small parts of the east are slightly more likely to be drier than average…
But – oops – in late January the rain started to fall, after all. First, it was just moderate, and the Bureau played it down. From January 30:
Recent rainfall has been beneficial for some drought and fire affected areas. However, several months of above average rainfall are needed to see a recovery from current long-term rainfall deficiencies.
But now comes more – so much more that the Bureau will have nowhere to go. Isn’t this the rain it said would not fall until April at best?
Heavy rain that has drenched the east coast of Australia has caused flooding and morning peak hour chaos — and much more is expected throughout the weekend and into next week.
The downpour is falling on large swathes of eastern NSW and Queensland, … prompting the Bureau of Meteorology to issue an urgent weather warning stretching 1000km from the NSW south coast to southern Queensland…
More than 250mm has fallen in some parts of the NSW Northern Rivers, with Byron Bay receiving the most rain — 281mm by 8am causing widespread flooding in the town’s centre, its heaviest falls in 47 years…
Firefighters have welcomed the rain. “We were over the moon to see rain arrive across many parts of NSW, with decent falls in the state’s north,” the RFS said.
The lesson?
The severe dry which made the bush so flammable was not caused primary by global warming but by a shift in ocean patterns called the Indian Ocean Dipole, which pushed cooler (yes, not warmer) water to our north west coast and dried up the rain.
So, no, the primary cause of the fires was not global warming, as almost very politician and journalist of the Left is screaming.
Hear that rain on your roof? That is the proof that you were wrong.
UPDATE
Don’t let those warmists forget this -prominent warmist Dr Andy Pitman last year admitting that global warming does not cause drought, or, as he later added, at least not directly:
This may not be what you expect to hear, but as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.
That may not be what you read in the newspapers and sometimes hear commented, but there is no reason a priori why climate change should made the landscape more arid…
There is no drying trend. There’s been a trend in the last twenty years, but there’s been no trend in the last hundred years, and that’s an expression on how variable Australian rainfall climate is…So the fundamental problem we have is that we don’t understand what causes droughts.
